Summer Vaca. '06

The Summer

Charlie Dowd

English 10H 9/1/06

School has just ended, after all of the final exams, and grading I'm finally free for the summer. Most of the student body is only thinking of one thing, and that's vacation. Of course my mind was swarming with ideas of activities that I'm going to be partaking in, let it be sailing building something, going somewhere exotic or just hanging around with friends. On the last bus ride home I decided to go home with Emily on her bus. Everyone on that bus was so excited, you could just feel the anticipation coming from the words coming from their mouths. We got dropped off at a nearby corner and as we walked down the sidewalk and through the bank parking lot behind her house, we spoke of fabulous visions of fun activities and games that we are going to be doing for the next 70 something days.

During the next couple of weeks I rode into Youngstown to Emily's house to hang out. Although much of the time we both found that all I basically did was eat, to anybody that knows me, this is completely normal. We also probably watched about 100 movies, actually more like 10 or 12 but whatever, it was a lot of movies.

Emily had an old hot-tub at her house that I managed to get running. It took a little work before the thing decided to run but then eventually it was alright. Unfortunately it only lasted for a couple weeks after I fixed it, so it saw about only one weeks use during the beginning of the summer. The problem was that the heater was grounding itself because Emily's dad decided to jury rig it together the way it was not supposed to be so basically due to poor construction, it broke.

Now in late June I begin to get food to make lunches for the Junior Sailing camp I'm in and start to look for a good life jacket. When these tasks were completed Junior Sailing started in one or two days and I'm very excited. This year was my 6th year in Junior Sailing and I knew it would be great because now I was in the Advanced Racing Team.

On the first day of the July Session of Junior Sailing had started, we all met on the front lawn of the YYC (Youngstown Yacht Club). The instructors read all of the names that should be present but I really don't remember if everyone was there (I highly doubt it). I knew immediately that the one kid that I don't exactly rival, but think of him as something other than a normal person is Alex. Me and him seem to get along, but somehow he thinks he's got something on me( I suspect that it might be the fact that he thinks he's "black")

For the next few weeks, I would ride my bike from my house, which is halfway between the middle of Youngstown, and Ransomville to the river, which is a good 3 miles. I would normally leave about 8:50 am thinking that ten minutes was ample time, but somehow I either slowed down or got sidetracked. I would arrive approximately 4 to 5 minutes late, and I'd through my stuff down and run "downstairs" (its really a hill) and just make it before attendance ended. We didn't actually do attendance in the lawn, but in the Junior Sailing building. The first thing I would normally do when I got down there would to look for my good friend Andy, which was only at Jr. sailing about a total of a week or two and see if he's there. If Andy wasn't there, id end up sailing with Alex, which believe me, it is not your average day of sailing.

Eventually me and Andy found that It began to get harder and harder to be able to sail together because I guess we "always" screwed around( according to the instructors). So in total, I only sailed with Andy four or five times total. During an regatta I found that I wasn't sailing with Andy that much at all (maybe once).

Generally a normal day at Junior Sailing would be pretty simple. I would arrive to attendance almost late. Then I would say hi to Andy and see what he was up to. After that there would be a briefing on what we were going to practice, and what drills we where doing that day. We would all be assigned to a boat, the boat that I sailed on was a vanguard Club 420 and the skippers, I was one, would be assigned their crew for the day and we would get the sails, rudder put on sunscreen. Usually we would rig the boats then put on our sailing boots, apply our sunscreen and put our lunches on the ROBALO which, of coarse was the name of the boat the instructors drove. Eventually we got punished for taking so long because apparently we were supposed get everything on before Junior Sailing. So when we finally got penalized, we did "stairs" which is when you have to go up and down these really long stairs 10 times, and it was difficult because we had to where everything that we sail in, and you'd get very hot. Then we would go out on the 420s into the lake, weather permitting and do drills until around noon, we then ate lunch in the boat for 45 minutes to an hour. We would then finish drills, maybe do a race or two then if ther was enough wind we would sail in. If not we would get towed in by the ROBALO. When we got in, we would pull in the boats, de-rig, go up to the Grist Mill, fold the sails and debrief on the positives or negatives of the days drills. After I left sailing around four o'clock I would ride my bike up to Emily's house if she was home, and we'd hang out and do something.

After Jrsailing had ended I still had plenty of sailing to do. Every Wednesday night at he yacht club I would meet down at six oclock to do Wednesday night racing on a J/100. Its really laid back sailing, especially when were not flying the chute (or the spinnaker). Long story short about the chute is that someone didn't like "all the work" of flying the chute, so the other boats in my division decided that it would be alright if we didn't fly the chute including us. This affected me the most